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  • From: "David ATTBI" <davidinglis2 AT attbi.com>
  • To: "Corpus-Paul@Lists. Ibiblio. Org" <corpus-paul AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [Corpus-Paul] Did P46 once contain the Pastorals?
  • Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 22:39:41 -0800

On 25 Feb 2003 at 19:04, Stephen C. Carlson wrote:

> P46 is a defective MSS, missing the end, and the scribe's handwriting got
> progressively smaller. Therefore, I am not so confident that we can
conclude
> that the Pastorals were in fact missing from P46. It's best to leave a
big
> question mark over this.

I think we can tell more from P46 than most people think. P46 is a single
quire papyrus codex. Because the pages are numbered we know that there were
originally 52 sheets of papyrus, folded in the middle to form 104 leaves.
The outer sheets have been lost (leaving 86 leaves) and the surviving text
begins at Rom 5:17 and ends at 1 Thes 5:28. In the first half of the codex
there are 26 lines per page, which then increases in the second half to 28,
then to 30, and finally to 32 lines per page. Why?

When a single quire codex is created the person writing it has a problem.
Once the writer has got half way through the codex (i.e. has started using
the right hand side of sheets that already have text on the left hand side)
then there is no way to add more sheets if needed (except by adding sheets
to the outside and leaving the first leaves empty). It seems that after
having written half the codex the scribe of P46 realized that he needed more
space for what he wanted to include, and so he increased the number of lines
per page.

Even at 32 lines per page there is no way to complete 1 Thes and then write
2 Thes, 1 & 2 Tim, Titus, and Philemon on the leaves that have been lost.
We can therefore reasonably assume that this MS used to include the whole of
both 1 & 2 Thes (and perhaps Philemon), but it was certainly not long enough
to have included the Pastorals as well. So, why did the scribe apparently
miscalculate, and what was he trying to do?

The only reasonable explanation is that the scribe did not have a single MS
to work from, since if he did then it would have been easy to find the
mid-point of the source MS and to have included enough leaves to fit the
first half of the text on the left hand side of P46, thus making sure that
he had room for the second half on the right hand side. It therefore seems
most likely that the scribe was working from individual MSS.

These MSS may have been written on different size papyrus leaves, by
different people, using different text sizes, thus making it very difficult
to determine exactly how much space was required in the codex. Given what
we know about Romans (i.e. that copies with different endings existed) it is
not unreasonable to suppose that the scribe had more than one copy of this
book to work from, and they may have been of differing lengths, making the
calculation harder still. The fact that the text of Romans in P46 has been
called “more wild” and less like that in other MSS than the text of the
other letters in P46, also indicates that the scribe may have had more than
one source document of Romans to work from.

We also don’t know what order the MSS were in when P46 was written, but
whatever the order was, if the scribe was uncertain of the space required it
would make most sense to start with the longest letter (Romans), and then
work downwards in size. That way there would be no problem in simply
omitting one or more of the shortest letters at the end if needed.

However, if the scribe had all of Paul’s letters, and if size alone was the
reason for the order then we would expect to see 1 & 2 Tim come before 1
Thes (or possibly Phm). The conclusion is therefore that either the scribe
considered the Pastorals to be of lower importance, or simply that he didn’t
know that they existed.

Another point to consider is: Why bother squeezing more onto the last few
pages if you know that it’s not all going to fit anyway? The implication is
that the scribe knew what he wanted to include, and was simply making sure
that everything fitted. From this it seems clear that the scribe never
intended to include the Pastorals. He almost certainly included both 1 & 2
Thessalonians, and perhaps Phm, but nothing else. Whether or not he then
wrote a smaller codex containing the remaining letters we will probably
never know.

Dave Inglis
davidinglis2 AT attbi.com
3538 O'Connor Drive
Lafayette, CA, USA




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